In 1998, the National Highway and Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported that every day an average of 7 children die and 866 are injured in automobile crashes. Used correctly, child safety seats are 71% effective in reducing infant deaths and 54% effective in reducing toddler deaths while reducing the need for hospitalization after a crash by 69%. A study in 1996 determined that 62% of the child restraint systems examined were found to be used incorrectly. Specifically, (1) the restraint system was improperly secured to the vehicle, or (2) the child was improperly secured in the child restraint, or (3) both errors occurred.
Incorrect use of the child's car seat has been a growing focus of the NHSTA, to the extent that the automobile industry was asked to comply to new regulations that required every passenger car made after September of 2002 to have a LATCH system whereby the car seat can be placed in the car without any fear of improper attachment of the car seat to the car. The remaining problem with improper car seat restraint is now that of unsafe harness use. In fact, misuse of restraints was observed in 79.5% of the systems studied. According to the NHTSA, for the harness to protect a child properly, the straps should be routed over the child's shoulders and pulled tight over the chest with only enough room for one adult sized finger to fit between the strap and the chest. This poses a problem in the winter, when, bulky outerwear makes it impossible to achieve the degree of tightness in the harness necessary for the child to be safe.
To solve this problem, the NHSTA recommends that parents remove bulky outerwear before putting children and infants in their car seats and using a blanket to keep them warm. This recommendation is highly impractical. First, it is sometimes difficult to get children into outerwear to begin with, as children are often resistant to the process. Further, a typical trip taken by a parent with a child might require multiple stops (e.g. at the store, the bank, the dry cleaners, etc). It is complicated enough to buckle children in and out of car seats multiple times, but adding the time and effort required to also repeatedly bundle children in, and out of outerwear as well would make such trips prohibitive. There is also a high likelihood that a child will get chilled during the time when the outerwear is being removed and the car seat buckled, as well as of the child either not being willing to use the prescribed blanket to stay warm during travel or losing the blanket and not being able to retrieve it (making it necessary for the driver to stop the car in order to retrieve it). The likely result of such problems is the continued misuse of harness straps.
What has been needed, therefore, is a child's outerwear garment that can be used safely with a car seat harness system while retaining convenience of use and the ability to keep the child warm at all times.